


Mask

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Blindfolds, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:54:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23831932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: “I’m a professional,” Shadow replied. “Even if we’re on more familiar terms now, there’s a whole world of people I don’t want seeing my face.”
Relationships: Tina Branford | Terra Branford/Locke Cole/Shadow
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7
Collections: Minigame: Round 1





	Mask

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neosaiyanangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neosaiyanangel/gifts).



> In which my plans that "characters actually talking about all the fucked up things that happened in canon" should terminate in a threesome play out in reverse.

Baram had once told Clyde that money wasn't a memento: money was money. There was no happenstance that could befall a stack of gil so as to make it unspendable; ill use and crime did not imprint themselves into metal. Once you had the stuff and it couldn’t be traced, it was substance without a past.

It was meant to comfort him, he supposed, to get his hands to stop shaking lest some imperial out in Maranda detect his unease and take them in for questioning. It might have done the trick then. He couldn’t recall. It was more likely that his nerves cooled amidst the three… four… five fingers of whiskey that Baram had tilted into a glass for him. He’d told him that it didn’t serve a shadow bandit to go about looking so pale.

If he was pale tonight, he didn’t know it. Shadow sat at another bar in another city, watching the gold drain from the sky as night set in over the dead world outside. He was drinking an overpriced Jidorian brandy that his money hadn’t paid for, hand angled over his exposed lower face. 

“We could get you a Doman fan to flutter about if you want to be coy, you know?” Locke said teasingly.

“I’m a professional,” Shadow replied. “Even if _we’re_ on more familiar terms now, there’s a whole world of people I don’t want seeing my face.”

Locke smirked, stood, and then leaned his lithe frame over the table, setting its uneven legs wobbling to and fro such that Terra nearly spilled her drink. She suppressed a giggle as he fumbled his way over to pry Shadow’s hands apart, bunching up the cheap velvet runner beneath him as he did so.

Shadow held the brandy aloft and at a distance, and he was about to say something biting when Locke swooped in for a kiss.

The bartender coughed. Terra straightened her back and looked around the empty tavern, as if to underscore just how little it contained anyone who might be cause for concern. Shadow drifted a little with the drink and the twilight as he let his arm slacken--as Locke’s hot mouth replaced the glass that had replaced the mask.

In the meantime, Terra found a steadier table and set down her snifter of the house specialty--something dark and smelling of anise. She then walked over to where the two of them were entangled, resting her thin, fey fingers on the back of his chair. He considered what it had been and would be like to have those fingers play in his hair. He considered that when the bills were paid and the accounts settled, they would all be alone together: his stubble rough against somebody’s face, his skin feeling the unmitigated heat of the summer air.

Locke finally broke the kiss. Shadow instinctively replaced the mask. If the lone barkeep was some marauding former associate hot for vengeance or blackmail, he certainly gave no indication that he’d recognized him. 

“You _are_ a professional,” Locke said, licking his upper lip as if to catch back some trace of the kiss. “I wonder sometimes if we ever had the same contacts.”

“I don’t speculate about the people who pay me.”

“That’s fine. I was speculating about the people who kiss you.”

If Shadow frowned a little at the remark, Locke couldn’t see it. Terra, in the meantime, turned her gaze out towards the sky, where a handful of stars were beginning to break through the cloud cover.

***

Later, when he sat alone on one of the inn’s sunken beds, checking and cleaning his gear, he considered Locke’s suggestion. He considered further that it was all bluster.

True, they had both been men of disreputable employ. True, they had both run in the midst of similar people of disrepute. There was an evident romance to the thought of them taking their pay and their paramours from the same networks: to have handled the same money and touched the same bodies before all this. 

Shadow, however, thought it a questionable proposition that either of them had ever kissed any soul who lay between Kohlingen and Thamassa. 

In all those years of running from his past, he had not been tempted by anything that came with more attachments than the gil it paid him. He had little reason to suspect that a man forever running _to_ his past would find it went differently, especially when his past was a woman.

Perhaps, Shadow thought as the door opened, there was a mad sort of logic that they should come together now with somebody who had practically no past at all.

He quickly stowed his gear in his satchel, and turned to see Terra, back-lit and bright in the light of the hallway.

“He says he’ll be up in a minute,” she said softly before coming to sit on the other edge of the same bed. She looked at him, violet eyes warm with moonlight.

His posture stiffened as he looked at her, uncertain as to how it was that the two of them should touch, uncertain as to how it had been that they’d touched in the past: even the past of twenty minutes ago. She broke through his doubts by laying a hand on his shoulder, and he closed his eyes a moment as he felt it. It was there--almost imperceptible but there. Even through so much cloth, there came that prickling sense of the magic running underneath her skin: something like fire or nettles or ice. 

He had always wondered, back before he’d left the Crescent, if somebody born to magic felt something similar when they touched him--if there were some equivalent means by which his inborn mundanity touched them. In all the years he’d lived as an almost husband to an almost wife, it had been a question he had never posed. 

“Hey,” Terra whispered warmly, noticing his silence. “You’re not asleep yet. Don’t fall into a dream on me now.”

He opened his eyes and did not object when she leaned her head against him, awkwardly bringing his arm around her as he felt that dim bristle of magic spread across his chest where her hair fell. He wondered what on earth he had done to end up like this: how he’d fallen out of the sky and into circumstances such as these. They'd just been three allies--not even friends--back before the world ended. Wandering along the Trench together, after all the mess with phoenixes and demons and whatever else it was, how had it been that the three of them happened on such an arrangement? What led to that first experimental "what if" that flung them together?

Terra slumped against him a little, leaning into the half-embrace. His shoulders fell as he allowed himself to be held. 

“Perhaps tonight’s the night I’ll wring a name out of you?” Locke said blithely as he entered the room. “I never know what I’m supposed to call out.” He locked the door behind him. They had a private suite, but he evidently wished to guard against some other member of their happy band deciding to check in on them.

“I have a name,” Shadow replied, tilting his head back to look at him.

“Shadow isn’t a real name.” Locke laughed. “I highly doubt your mother, upon being delivered of you, held you close and said ‘Ah yes, what a dour and imposing child. I think I shall call him little Shadow!’”

“What if she did?” He flopped backwards, sprawling on the bed while Terra came tumbling down laughing alongside him. “What if those were her dying words just before I slit her throat and earned my first nickel?”

Locke grinned and leaned over him, pulling down his mask very suddenly such that his eyes were suddenly covered and his mouth suddenly exposed. Shadow felt Terra shift her weight around him, her light frame moving to straddle his body as Locke bent over to grace him with another kiss. He brought his hands quickly up to catch him by the neck and hold him in place.

He could feel Locke, mid-kiss, dexterously pry the ornamental visor off of his mask (which had by this point awkwardly come to rest somewhere in the vicinity of his nose). Shadow pulled him closer, almost eager to make things clumsier, almost eager to see if he could make trouble. Terra, in the meantime, began to unlace his pants.

It was so strange, even as she pulled him free, that he still felt most acutely naked as regarded his half-uncovered face. He gasped a little, as she circled her hand around his shaft and began to stroke him. Even then, lost as he was in the hot lips, teeth, and tongue pressed hot against him, he still felt a guard against showing too much. Even caught between the two people who intended to fuck him senseless, he was on edge as to how they might read his expression.

“I think,” Terra said, quickening her pace, “that anyone has a right to any name they choose for themselves--that you can choose whomever it is you wish to be.” He could almost hear her smile, almost feel that sphinxlike look of contentment she would have in the midst of watching him. “I suppose I’d just ask if Shadow is what you wish.”

Locke placed his hands around Shadow’s wrists, and Shadow let him pull them apart, let him break off their kiss and leave him panting. He waited for some quip, some follow up, some further banter about names and their uses, but all he got was a soft nuzzle against the side of his face as Locke moved to finish undressing him. For as much damn gear as Shadow managed to wear, it was fortunate to have a thief’s nimble fingers doing the work. 

It wasn’t long before they had him stark--all except the hood. They brought him up to sitting, and found himself between them, blind and hard and shuddering as their mingled breath fell cool on his skin.

There was a moment that seemed to stick then, as if time had grown sluggish amidst the humidity. Terra had left off stroking him. Locke was behind him, evidently hard and in some state of undress himself by the feel of it.

He felt then that he ought to say something: to give them his name and his history--to let them know that the last woman and the last man he loved were dead and he’d left them to die.

“...”

He took that quick little inhalation of breath one takes before speaking. It was stolen from him almost immediately as Terra’s lips were suddenly against his own. 

“I agree, you know,” Locke whispered in his ear, “although you are more than welcome to be a Shadow if that’s what you decide you are.”

Locke kissed the back of his neck, running his fingers over one of the many long scars that cut across his shoulders. Elsewhere, Shadow could feel Terra lean close against him--the soft press of her breasts and hands on his skin, the faint thrill of magic underneath it. She pulled back and sighed, her breath hitching a little as she arched her hips against him.

“I’d like to think though,” she said, “that you’re something a little more substantial than shadows.”

He moaned as he felt himself sink into her, as she wrapped her legs over his and began to ride him. From somewhere over his shoulder he could feel Locke’s face meet hers as the two of them kissed with him sandwiched in between.

Shadow did not say anything. He did not say his name, nor did he say theirs, nor did he say what he wanted to be. He rutted and panted in the midst of their embrace, blind and caught in the heat of so much skin and flesh against his. 

His thoughts drifted as they moved--from heady anticipation as to all the future configurations of their bodies to a sickly nostalgia for all the ways he had once been close to someone. He wondered if there was some chain that connected them to their past: if Locke’s beloved and his ghosts all the nobodies Terra might once have known hovered now between them.

He wondered if crime--even if it did not linger in coins--might still imprint itself in flesh.

Shadow’s mind returned to the immediacy of their coupling as he felt Terra’s thighs tighten around his own, and he ached to imagine what she looked like that instant. It was without much thought or consideration that he pulled off his mask.

Suddenly they were there, face to face, his own eyes reflected in hers. Locke’s thumb grazed the contour of his jaw.

He knew that they were looking at him, and he knew that he was no doubt very pale. His sandy hair was probably clumped in a dozen cowlicks about his head. He laughed a little when Locke tousled it. 

Slowly, he ran his hands along Terra’s naked back, resting them at her hips to pull her into his thrusts. He did not say anything--not when she came, shuddering hard against him; not when Locke pinned him to the bed and did his utmost to pick up where she left off; not through all their manifold explorations and caresses that followed. 

It was only later, when they had collapsed into a heap of sweat and stray scarves, that he turned between them and looked up at the ceiling, breathing in the muggy scent of so much pollen and dust. 

Speaking to both or neither of them, Clyde said a great many things he thought likely to send him flying back across the hills come sunrise--until he landed back at the Colosseum or roamed his way to the endless Veldt or hid himself beneath the sea. 

The sky was still dark, however. 

Resting between their two bodies, he spent a long night drifting through dreamless sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.


End file.
